I've been covering the reaction to a video game called PRAGMATA this month because it's become the largest battleground in the culture war, and all because it depicts a man protecting a little girl.
The game is creative in many ways. It's a brand new IP, a fresh take on shooter gameplay, and of course, it has a story that will warm your heart as you watch the interactions between protagonists Hugh, a man sent to investigate an issue on a lunar base, and Diana, an android that both looks and acts like a 6-year-old girl. The duo's relationship is very similar to that of a father and his daughter, and it's caused many men to express love for the game because it activates that protective part of them. Many have expressed their desire to actually have a daughter one day after playing the game.
And I can just imagine Shinzo Abe nodding in approval from heaven. Some conspiracy theorists believe that this is actually a ploy by the Japanese government to encourage men to have children, which means Abe may have worked with Capcom to develop this game for that end.
But I do want to emphasize that this is just a conspiracy theory (and if it is, then it's the most wholesome conspiracy theory I've ever heard of.)
Read: The Video Game 'PRAGMATA' Has Become the Anti-Natalist's Nightmare
But the left has reacted quite negatively to this game, with a lot of the accusations revolving around men liking this because of some innate pedophilic desire to Diana, and they use the fact that a subreddit dedicated to the game had to be nuked because Redditors were continuously posting Diana in pedophilic ways. This is, of course, not representative of men as a whole. Reddit is a cesspool of some of the most degenerate people on the planet.
The thing is, no matter what the left is mad about, it all revolves around attacking men and painting them as fundamentally broken and wrong.
I think this piece from The Gamer is, in my opinion, one of the better examples of just how the left misunderstands men on the most basic level. The piece, written by The Gamer's Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley, who is transgender and will be referred to as "he" for the remainder of this article, hilariously doesn't understand men. Not surprisingly, given that Henley has sacrificed his manhood on two different altars, feminism and transgenderism.
The article spends a lot of time covering the pedophile angle and using Reddit as the wind-up for the anti-male blow he's going for. It's the final paragraph where he finally lands the hit he was truly aiming for:
I have not yet played Pragmata, and that's because I'm a little tapped out on stories where men adopt daughter-like figures and prove their masculinity by protecting them. I suppose it's marginally a better power fantasy than killing everybody with your awesome strength, but then The Last of Us makes room for both anyway. If I play Pragmata - and Capcom's post-launch attitude towards the Diana fandom will be a major factor in this - it won't be because I find the child at the centre of the game attractive. I hope gaming can get back to a place where, if it's too much to hope that these people cease to exist, that at the very least they don't get to be so proud of it without consequence.
If this were a piece solely focused on saying "Hey, pedophilia is bad, and we should gas up the wood chipper for anyone who thinks it's good," then I'd be wholly on board with it, but that clearly wasn't the purpose of the piece. That final paragraph is proof positive that this was, in fact, another "Masculinity is ultimately toxic" narrative.
But it's a narrative born of ignorance as much as it is prejudice.
The truth is that men don't protect to prove anything. The instinct to protect is innate. It's not what the left would call a social construct. It's not something we perform to gain approval from others.
Protecting things that are precious to us, be it a wife, a son or daughter, or even a child that's not our own, a pet, or even property, is a means to give the things we care about a safe, healthy life, which leads to prosperity. Watching things flourish under our protection and support gives us a very deep-seated, natural kind of joy.
We want this joy so badly on an instinctual level that we'll willingly sacrifice our own lives to make sure it happens.
While Diana of PRAGMATA is a fictional robot child, the adventure the game sends us on activates a tiny portion of that "protect the child" instinct, and even that feels amazing. It scratches a very primal itch that doesn't need approval from outside sources or encouragement from peers to be enjoyed. In fact, men are known to defy entire peer groups to protect their own.
We don't do this to "prove" anything. We defy nature, sometimes with violence if necessary, so that nurturing can occur.
I think feminists cannot comprehend men doing something selfless like this because they've convinced themselves for years and years that men are only capable of self-service at the cost of everyone and everything around them, but the opposite is true. History is filled to overflowing with men who built society at the cost of their own lives for the betterment of those they cared about, and continue to keep that society at the cost to their own lives without thinking twice about it.
Men are not mustache-twisting villains ready to rape the vulnerable at every given opportunity. The viral "man or bear" conversation that happened on the internet is proof that feminists think men are only capable of harming others, and they want other women to think that so badly that when men demonstrate the exact opposite in the cultural space, they have to paint it as something deeply sinister.
But the truth is catching up to the lie, and PRAGMATA is oddly undoing decades of feminist work.
By the way, the game is good. You should buy it.
